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Surrey Parish Records 1538-1987 – now online and available free at the Society of Genealogists

The recently released Surrey Parish Records, 1538-1987 are the latest addition to Ancestry.co.uk's extensive family of UK parish registers. They include more than 2 million new records of baptisms, marriages and burials from the county.

These records have been digitised in association with Surrey County Council’s Surrey History Centre, which holds records of the Diocese of Guildford (including a small part of Hampshire) and the Diocese of Southwark (excluding South London and Sutton).

Ancestry's Blog gives some interesting insite into what you can find in these registers. Among the new Surrey records you’ll be able to find a number of famous residents, including:

The baptism record of writer and author of Jeeves and Wooster fame, Pelham Grenville (P.G.) Wodehouse, born and baptised at Guildford, Holy Trinity, on 17th November 1881.

The burial record of John Derrick, probably the first named person to have played cricket. He was buried in Holy Trinity, Guildford, on 27 October 1613.The first reference [to cricket] appears in the Guildford Court Book of 1598 where John Derrick records that when he was a scholar at the Royal Grammar School, ‘hee and diverse of his fellows did runne and play there at Creckett and other Plaies’.

William Bray (1736-1832), whose 1755 diary contains the earliest known reference to the game of baseball, was baptised and buried in Shere, and perhaps married in Worplesdon in 1758.

The collection also contains the burial record of Sir Barnes Nevill Wallis, engineer and inventor of the bouncing bomb used in the Dambusters Raid.

Ancestry.co.uk is available to view free of charge at the Society of Genealogists